Rift Gains On Vive In September Steam Hardware Survey

Steam’s monthly hardware survey is one of the few sources we have for gauging the proportions of Oculus Rift and HTC Vive users out there, and September’s results suggest the former is still closing the gap with the latter.

In August’s survey, we saw Rift capture 43.81% of total VR usage on Steam, a dramatic 8.1% leap over July and closing the gap on Vive’s 52.31% usage. The difference is narrower still in September: 46.87% of VR usage was on Rift, 50.16% of it was on Vive. In other words there’s about 4% of difference between the two now.

As always, we have to point out this is in no way a definitive means of measuring how many Rifts there are compared to Vives out in the wild right now, but given Steam’s popularity this is still a somewhat reliable source.

Rift’s increase is no doubt owed to the recent summer sale, in which Oculus priced its headset bundled with Touch controllers at $399, a good $400 cheaper than Vive was at the time and $200 off the original price tag for the pair. Now that the sale is over, Rift costs $499, but Vive also recently cut its price down to $599. That price cut was announced on August 21st, so this survey will have felt its effects.

Now that Rift and Vive are both available at new permanent prices, how will we see the survey shift over the coming months?